The Agile Revolution: How Coherence Broke Every Rule of Filmmaking

Most filmmakers spend years chasing bigger budgets, larger crews, and more control. James Ward Byrkitt did the opposite. He stripped everything away.

The result is Coherence, a film that lives rent-free in the heads of people who watch it. Not because of special effects or A-list names. Because it feels alive in a way most movies don’t anymore. The actors are genuinely discovering what happens. The audience is discovering it with them. No safety net. No second takes to fix it. Just raw, unscripted human beings responding to a premise that gets stranger by the minute.

When I first watched Coherence, I felt like I was living in one of its alternate realities. That’s when I knew I had to talk to the director myself. And what he told me about the creative process behind the film changed how I think about production, constraint, and what it actually takes to make something that matters.

The Waterfall Model Doesn’t Work Anymore

In tech, there are two approaches to building something: the waterfall model and agile development.

The waterfall model is what we’ve been doing in film for decades. You throw everything at it. You hire every specialist. You design for every possible variation. You build top-down, with all the best experts in the room, trying to create one perfect thing before you ever hit record.

The problem? It’s slow. It’s expensive. And by the time you’re done, the world has moved on.

Byrkitt looked at that model and asked a different question: What if I only built what I actually needed?

“All I really need to make a movie is a picture and sound,” he explained during our conversation. “That’s technically all you need. I don’t necessarily need a costume department, don’t necessarily need an art department, don’t necessarily need special effects.”

This is the agile approach. Build the bare bones. Make it function. Let it grow organically from there, showing you what you need as you go.

For Coherence, that meant:
– No script (the director planned the plot, but actors improvised every word)
– No crew (just the director, a cinematographer, and two audio engineers hidden in another room)
– Five nights of shooting in a single house
– Six actors who mostly didn’t know each other beforehand

Most people would call that reckless. Byrkitt calls it freedom.

Why Constraints Actually Make You More Creative

There’s a paradox in creative work that most people miss: having unlimited resources doesn’t make you more creative. It makes you paralyzed.

When you have every tool available, you spend half your time justifying why you need it. When you have nothing, you spend all your time solving the problem in front of you.

Byrkitt learned this the hard way. He’d worked on massive productions before, Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, where he was a designer and storyboard artist. He saw the machinery up close. Hundreds of people. Weeks of waiting around. Technical experts solving problems he didn’t even know existed.

“When you’re on a movie, you’re mostly waiting around,” he said. “You’re waiting for lights to be moved, or you’re waiting for actors to come out of their trailer. You’re just waiting. You’re not really filmmaking.”

So he flipped the model. Instead of waiting for permission and resources, he asked: What if I got rid of everything that slows me down?

The result was a filmmaking process that looked less like a Hollywood production and more like a creative sprint. The director was shooting the entire time. The actors were performing the entire time. Every moment was being captured because there was no downtime to interrupt the flow.

That’s the agile approach applied to filmmaking: minimum viable product, maximum creative velocity.

The Trust That Comes From Knowing You Can’t Fail

The scariest part of Coherence wasn’t the premise. It was asking six actors to improvise an entire film without a script.

Most actors would panic. Some did, at first.

“The trust didn’t come for a day or two,” Byrkitt admitted. “They trusted me as a friend, but the process was pretty scary for some of them, especially some of them had never done improv ever.”

The breakthrough came when the actors realized they couldn’t actually fail.

“I had to keep telling them: there’s nothing you could do that was wrong,” he explained. “If you need to go to the bathroom, if you need to switch your chair, if you need to interrupt somebody, all that’s okay, because I’m going to edit out anything I don’t like.”

That sentence is the entire philosophy of low-pressure creative work. You remove the stakes of the moment so the actors can focus on being present instead of being perfect.

By the second night, something shifted. The actors stopped trying to generate the story and started trusting that the structure was already there for them. They could relax into the performance. They could react authentically to what was happening instead of performing what they thought should happen.

That’s when the real magic started.

What Improv Reveals That Scripts Can’t

Here’s what most screenwriters miss: real dialogue doesn’t follow screenplay rules.

When more than two people are in a scene together, they talk over each other. They interrupt. They bring up tangents. They make jokes that don’t land. They say things that don’t connect to what anyone just said. Real human conversation is messy.

“Scripts don’t really reflect real dialogue patterns,” Byrkitt said. “Mostly when you have more than a few people together talking, only one person would talk at a time. But that’s not how people talk. Everyone would be talking.”

The improv actors brought that naturalism to Coherence. They created dialogue that could only happen in the moment, triggered by what they were actually hearing from someone else, not what they’d memorized from a page.

“There’s no way you could have written that because it can only be triggered by what someone is hearing in the moment,” he said. “The improv is completely responsible for making that stuff sparkle.”

This is the core insight: authenticity isn’t something you can script. It emerges from real human beings responding to real circumstances in real time. The director’s job isn’t to write it. It’s to create the conditions where it can happen.

The Ending Nobody Wants to Understand

Coherence ends ambiguously. That’s intentional.

Some people hate this. Byrkitt is clear about it: “Some people hate this movie. I think it is because they don’t get the answers. You’re not gonna get the answers. You may get a different answer every time you watch it.”

That’s not a bug. It’s the entire point.

The film operates on curiosity, not dread. The characters are trying to figure out what’s happening. The audience is trying to figure it out with them. Nobody has certainty. That uncertainty is the experience.

What makes the ending work isn’t that it answers the question. It’s that it shows you what happens when someone stops waiting for perfect information and makes a choice anyway.

Em, the protagonist, gets to a point where she stops trying to solve the puzzle and starts acting on incomplete knowledge. She makes a decision that might be right or might be terrible. But she makes it. And in that choice, she becomes active instead of passive.

“I think of it as kind of positive,” Byrkitt said about the ending. “Nobody died and she’s like, oh, I guess like I’m just free to live my life now.”

That’s the real victory. Not the answer. The freedom to move forward without one.

What This Means for How We Create

The lessons from Coherence apply to any creative work, not just filmmaking.

Strip away what you don’t need. Trust the people around you. Create conditions where authenticity can happen instead of trying to manufacture it. Let constraints force you into creative solutions instead of using unlimited resources as an excuse.

Most importantly: understand that the audience doesn’t want perfection. They want to feel like they’re in the room with real human beings having a real moment. That’s the only thing that scales.

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Want to hear the full conversation with director James Ward Byrkitt about how he made a mind-bending sci-fi film with five nights, no crew, and pure creative trust?

Listen at https://www.youtube.com/@ParallelFrequenciesDaily | More at https://www.ridethewave.media/show/parallel-frequencies-w-just-blane-coco/